On Thu, 21 Aug 2008, Heidelberg, Chris wrote:
Fred:
special advisor on Facebook's board, so I am not sure whether moving your class to Ning will change anything in this age of media consolidation. I spoke to Rafat Ali, CEO of paidContent, about his recent sale for $30 million online for an interview, and he admitted that the money changes things. I think it is safe to say that Facebook and Ning will end up as strategic partners or Ning will get bought outright by Microsoft or Facebook. My big question is why don't you have students create pseudo accounts to protect their identities. I use Facebook as a communications tool as well as content distribution tool.
Building on what Terrell has said - I'm not interested in asking/compelling my students to break the rules of any site. I'm interested in courseware - not trying to make a political statement. In my opinion, Facebook's groups are well-suited for reading discussions (and not a whole lot more). Facebook allows private groups, allowing us to create a class-only board, one whose contents didn't creep into other spaces in Facebook. What I was unable to get away from was the multiple-contexts of Facebook. The network, as opposed to affordances, creates a situation where students are forced to mingle the social and academic identities. I wanted to get away from that - and Ning provides that space for now (but certainly not forever). -Fred
Chris
-----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Fred Stutzman Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 9:54 AM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] question about use of Facebook in classroom
Hello,
I've also used Facebook in my class - we created a private group and hosted our online reading discussions in the group. I felt this turned out well - participation was opt-in, no one was compelled - but I also worried about the ethics of such an exercise, particularly the incursion of "school" into a primarily social place.
The particular exercise you describe is slightly worrisome. Particularly, asking/compelling students to change their profile. Due to the many, mixed contexts of Facebook, such change could have significant implications for the subject or their friend group. And there's certainly a question of whether the students would be comfortable with such self-experimentation to begin.
The data collection, on the other hand, sounds like an interesting hands-on research opportunity. Perhaps instead of asking the students to change their own profiles, you might think about creating a few dummy accounts of different age/gender for pooled use by the class?
For my class this semester, we're moving our discussions out of Facebook and into Ning. In the end, I decided that moving school into the social space created some issues, and a site like Ning could deliver the affordances without all of the contextual issues. We'll see how that works.
Best, Fred
On Wed, 20 Aug 2008, Stephanie Tuszynski wrote:
Hello all-
I'm teaching an "intro to advertising" class this fall and I was considering using Facebook in class to talk about targeted ads. A few weeks ago I was reading a discussion about the rather unpleasant weight loss ads that seem to pop up to anyone identifying as female on
FB and I switched my profile to have an unspecified gender and made my
age something like 99 years old to see what happened. What I want to do is have the students make notes for a couple weeks on what ads they
were getting on FB and then have them replicate the same thing - change gender and age status and see what happens for the next couple weeks, then we'll compare the data in class to talk about what kinds of ads are targeted to who, etc.
I am NOT requiring students to get a FB account for the class. Those who don't have one would collect the information provided by those who
do and do some analysis. Also this is not research, it's a course exercise, so HSRB isn't a factor.
But still, I wanted to run this concept by the people who deal with these kinds of exercises and have spent more time thinking about the ethics of this kind of thing than I or any of my colleagues. Does this
sound acceptable, from an ethical standpoint?
Dr. Stephanie Tuszynski Assistant Professor of Communication Bethany College
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-- Fred Stutzman 919-260-8508 ibiblio.org/fred fred@metalab.unc.edu Co-Founder and Developer, ClaimID.com Ph.D. Student, Teaching and Research Fellow, SILS UNC-Chapel Hill